The violence of warfare is a difficult problem to analyse given the disparities that often occur in the sources between personal narratives and the dry statistics of army organisation.

In addition there is the problem, often discussed by modern historians, of whether the history of battles is possible at all given the narrative conventions employed to describe it.

Second, the scope and type of armaments became more varied. An arms race between the offensive and defensive modes of warfare accelerated, so that for example cannon developed both in terms of reliability and man­oeuvrability. The ‘invention' of artillery in the Middle Ages later became an all-purpose explanation for historical change (along with printing) and its importance in specific events was sometimes exaggerated. All the same, its significance can scarcely be denied - both the rapidity of development from 1460 to 1480 and the standardisation of the 1550s. The employment of iron shot became general and then the calibres of artillery pieces became standar­dised by the middle of the sixteenth century, so that the cannon of Henri II of France and Emperor Charles V became recognised forms. It also became cheaper for mounting on ships when, as in the England of the 1540s, cast iron became available for manufacture. So Charles V prepared an artillery train of seventy-two pieces for his Algiers campaign of 1541 and had eighty-eight pieces for his army on the Picard frontier in 1553, Henri II thirty-four pieces for his Metz campaign of 1552.

At the same time, the engineering techniques for constructing fortresses capable of resisting artillery bombardment developed first in Italy and then in the Low Countries, northern France and England.

Handguns were developing as serious adjuncts to infantry and cavalry formations. It became normal for private soldiers to own their own hand­guns, even though cannon were largely a monopoly of the state. Of course, the dominant form of infantry warfare was still the pike square developed first by the Swiss and then generalised throughout western Europe. But infantry armed with arquebuses (first among the Spanish, later the French) were already common on the battlefield by 1560.

The static aspect of warfare is to be seen in explanations and justifications. The distinction commonly made between types of war, between ‘wars of magnificence' waged to defend the faith or to defend dynastic right, and ‘common war', waged for the crude acquisition of territory, remained. The latter embraces what earlier theorists had sometimes called ‘guerre mortelle' (‘war to the death' waged by non-nobles) in which no ransoms were taken, and ‘guerre a feu et a sang' (‘war in fire and blood'), usually envisaged as a non-chivalric form of warfare.

The Growth of Military Power in Western Europe objectives as well as dynastic interests. Huizinga, though he sought to emphasise the importance of chivalric ideals in the late Middle Ages, char­acterised such ideals as increasingly at odds with reason of state and concerns for wealth and power. As in earlier periods, the line between ‘war in fire and blood' and chivalric war was repeatedly blurred.

At Mezieres in October 1521, jousts were held between ‘champions' on horseback and on foot between the French garrison and the besieging force under Nassau. Yet within weeks, both sides were carrying out ‘war in fire and blood' along the borders of the Ardennes, which the memoirist and military commander Guillaume du Bellay thought were the origin of ‘the great cruelties wrought in war during the thirty years afterwards'.¹ Traditional attitudes saw the transmutation of nobilities, with their inherited conceptions of personal honour, from the main body of armies into the officer corps. Many writers in the sixteenth century still assumed that the nobility's calling was war; for Guillaume du Bellay, war was ‘the custom and usual calling of the nobility of France'. The military commander Blaise de Monluc (c. 1502­77) in his Commentaires was categorical: ‘Remember, you who have been born gentlemen, that you were given life by God to bear arms and to serve your prince, not just to go hunting or make love.' Montaigne was more measured but made the same point: ‘The true and only form of nobility in France is the military calling.'^{[494] [495]} This meant that warfare, however bloody, continued to be waged under a patina of aristocratic assumptions about proper behaviour.

All this took place against a background of serious, in some ways world­wide, struggles for dominance between the dynastic states, which dominated the core areas of western Europe. At their centre stood France, a kingdom of

over 18 million people with a growing taxation base, faced from 1519 by a rival complex of power, the Habsburg dynasty, which by the 1520s dominated the western Mediterranean, the Low Countries and part of Germany, as well as starting to acquire an American empire. The long struggle between these powers, which grew out of the pivotal struggle for the control of Italy from the late fifteenth century onwards, saw the employment of armies on multi­ple fronts and the virtual impossibility of stable peace until the two dynastic states had exhausted themselves and had entered into an era of religious warfare in 1559.

Emperor Charles V had at his disposal a formidable infantry formation in the form of the Castilian tercios, bodies of 3,000 infantrymen who dominated the European battlefields during the sixteenth century but the emperor also struggled with complex and far-flung problems of finance and organisation. The kings of France had one of the earliest ‘standing armies' at their disposal which ultimately generated a direct taxation system, but there were also always problems of finance. How many men did this entail? In the late fifteenth century, it was essentially still a cavalry army, notionally composed of noblemen, that was supplemented on active campaign by new levies of foot and mercenaries.

As far as the impact of war is concerned, the core dynamic is that of numbers. Typical armies of the late fifteenth century seldom attained more than 20,000 men, often half that. By the mid sixteenth century, it was possible to field armies of 50,000, with Charles V at the time of the Metz campaign having perhaps 150,000 men under his control in all. As for the numbers deployed, contemporaries were famously reluctant to count in detail. At the start of his chronicle of Louis XII's wars, Jean d'Auton diffidently waived aside the problem: he sought to enumerate the army ‘but I won't do it in fear of exaggeration and provoking annoyance'.^[496] Administration itself was inexact.

Fraud, in the form of taking money for non-existent soldiers, in both cavalry and infantry formations was endemic, despite the repetition of detailed regulations on the musters, with the result that the crown could often have no clear idea of how many men there were in an army, even though it might know the number of companies.

The tendency was for the size of armies to rise inexorably. Louis XI at the height of his military operations in 1481-3 against the Burgundian Netherlands had 45,000 men at his disposal in different theatres. With support forces, supply staff and hangers-on, this amounted to feeding more like 80,000 people.

The military establishment of 1552 needed to be ratcheted up by the demands of repeated campaigns. The army was then listed as: first, the military household, then 1,600 lances (notionally 4,000 horse), 2,940 light horse in thirty-six companies, forty-one companies (18,600) of French infan­try, 7,000 Swiss and four regiments of lansquenets, six companies of Scots and one of English. The likely maximum for the infantry is 30,000. The garrisons of the kingdom itself included a further 1,500 horse and 12,000 infantry plus 12,000 in Piedmont. The campaign lists for the army after the capture of Metz show around 36,000 men, to which the garrison resources of the kingdom should be added at 11,450 men. This seems to have been the maximum the crown could put together. A figure between 50,000 and 60,000 would there­fore seem to be a good rough estimate for the entire military resources of the kingdom in 1552. By the end of the 1550s, the French state could not have been paying fewer than 70,000-80,000 men by the end of the Habsburg-Valois wars in periods of active campaigns.

Increased numbers had serious implications for breakdowns in pay sys­tems, especially by the 1550s when all monarchies were going through severe financial crises. One of the consequences of relatively undeveloped supply systems was the continuation of the custom of ‘living off the land' by soldiers. War was destructive, of course, both for combatants and for civilians. For the ordinary soldier, the ‘pains' of war were commonplace. Jean Molinet expressed this when speaking of the rigours of the military life: ‘You rich bourgeois, you wouldn't put up with six leagues of such marching for all the gold in your coffers.'^[497] In the late fifteenth century Robert de Balsac insisted on the king's need to pay his gens d'armes (the heavy cavalry of the French monarchy paid from the new direct tax, the taille) regularly, ‘for they earn their pay with great pain and travail... and are as poor as Joab'. In the early sixteenth century, Pierre Gringore could write of the ‘pains and anguish' endured by soldiers, including hunger, thirst, heat, cold, dust, rain and snow, and harsh discipline.^[498]

Such ‘pains' were, of course, primarily endured on the field of battle. Anyone who has tried to reconstruct the events of a battle will be aware of the problems of doing so, though this has not impeded generations of writers who have attempted it. It is obvious that historians usually know the out­come of battle; they can even in some cases estimate the reasons for victory (though this is much more problematic). What actually happened on the field in fact puts an impossible strain on the contradictory sources. Even the topography of the battlefield is often difficult to reconcile with contemporary narratives. This applies as much to the widespread attempts to depict battle in prints and painting during this period, as encapsulated in the military histor­ian John Hale's remark that ‘battles sprawled, art condensed'. Moreover, victors commemorated, losers avoided; thus all known depictions of Francis I's surrender at Pavia are made by artists employed by the Habsburgs or their subjects. Peter Burke has pointed out that increased legibility in Renaissance

The Growth of Military Power in Western Europe battle painting does not imply increased realism. There is a fundamental gap between ‘what actually happens' in a battle and the processes available for narrating and depicting it and, naturally, the further back we go those processes are so much the more formalised if not stereotyped. In an age when a community of 10,000 was a substantial town and few cities topped 30,000, armies of between 10,000 and 50,000 were the largest gatherings of human beings most people would ever encounter in any one place before the nineteenth century.

To take just one example of many, Martin du Bellay's account of the Battle of Ceresole (April 1544) is measured and, as far as can be checked, accurate in detail. Ceresole represented an attempt by France to return to intervention in northern Italy. It was a rare French victory but one without consequences because of the Anglo-Imperial invasion of France during the following summer. Du Bellay's account places little emphasis on his own achievements (even though these were clearly important). His is the account of one of the commanders responsible for the overall tactics of the battle. Blaise de Monluc's account, on the other hand, is much fuller, dominated by incidental detail with himself at the centre of the narrative and deriving any overall view of the field from his reading of du Bellay. Monluc is a writer for the press of battle, described very much in terms of a rugby scrum (‘shove soldiers, shove'). His account concentrates on his own part in the battle and his opinions are trenchant. The duc d'Enghien's (the French commander) charge he describes as ‘ill-advised', ‘furious but ill-considered'; the Swiss troops in French service (Gruyeriens) were cowards and ‘unworthy to bear arms'. What these two accounts display is that, though both soldier-writers were anxious to explain and understand the causes of success and failure in battle, their understanding was very different.^[499]

The internal dynamics are therefore subject to all the usual vagaries of historical contradictions. Modern historians have approached the subject from two angles. First, there is the broadening out of the reconstructed narrative of battle to take account of the experiences of the rank-and-file. Then, we can now understand more clearly that the narrative framework for classifying and describing battles already existed before the event and such encounters were narrated within that framework, which was not fixed but evolved. Hence the concept of a move from the ‘feat of arms' to ideological conflict, though even in the early Middle Ages there was always an element

of the ideological, if we can give that name to the concept of victory as validating right or the will of God.

The effects of battle in an era of artillery and firearms warfare need to be considered. At Pavia in 1525 a French army superior in numbers (24,000­26,000 French against 20,000 Imperials) and artillery (sixty cannons against twenty) was annihilated by a force heavily armed with handguns, though the extent of the disaster is uncertain. Contemporary accounts tended to exaggerate the disparity in numbers in order to emphasise the extent of divine sanction. Pavia was undoubtedly one of the most murderous battles of the sixteenth century. Pescara the Imperial commander gave the order to take no prisoners, though this was not unusual, Louis XII having done the same at Agnadello in 1509. Imperial propaganda spread around such figures as 12,000 French dead against around 500 of the emperor’s army. The most recent estimates suggest that, out of 60,000 men on both sides on the field, 18-23 per cent were killed, clearly the majority French and Swiss, though some of these were drowned or killed in the flight by peasants. The after­math of such battles was gruesome. Alessandro Benedetti witnessed the corpses strewn across the battlefield of Fornovo (1495), more of a drawn battle, half-naked, stripped by peasants who had watched the battle from the neighbouring hills. The wounded lay naked in the sun begging for water, and in the Venetian camp there were amputations and the guts of the dying strewn around.^[500] Jean d’Auton vividly described the gentlemen com­ing into Chaumont’s headquarters after the attack on the the modern artillery bastion at Genoa in 1507:

The whole building, above and below, was full of the dying. I saw there several gentlemen arrive who had been in the battle, of whom some had not yet had their armour removed, all exhausted, their faces spattered with powder and sweat... at supper-time a great crowd of Swiss arrived, some carrying others on their pikes, all wounded and bleeding.^[501]

The picture is much the same when the surgeon Ambroise Pare reported his commission to search for bodies after the Battle of Saint-Quentin in 1557. At the camp he found bodies, ‘decomposed and unrecognisable. We saw the land for a half league around covered with dead bodies and could not stay because of the terrible smell that rose from the bodies of men and horses and we caused a great cloud of flies to rise as we went; they almost blocked out the sun and their buzzing was amazing.'^[502] The period was one in which not only the rank-and-file but also the commanders suffered high casualty rates, especially for those who lost the battle. Rout had always been the moment of maximum slaughter. Francis I was captured at Pavia and many of his closest commanders were killed. Even after a victory, losses among the commanders were sometimes high and disease could set in to an army, as after Marignano. Far-flung expeditions to Naples, as under Lautrec in 1528 and Guise in 1557 led to the disintegration of armies through epidemics. Artillery and its destructiveness was a normal feature of pitched battles by the start of the sixteenth century. In the first stage of the battles for the crossing of the Garigliano in October 1503, we are told that twenty French cannons were firing at once against Gonzalo de Cordoba's forces, ‘which carried away often, twenty, thirty and forty at a time, so that where the shot struck there was nothing but dismembered heads, arms and bodies'.^{[503] [504]} At Ravenna, one of the hardest-fought battles of the age, Bayard's biographer gave French losses as 3,000 foot and eighty men-at-arms while the Spanish lost 10,000 infantry and twenty captains.11 At Malignano, according to Bouchet, ‘The fight was cruel and long... and the French and Swiss were so determined to slaughter each other that only nightfall separated them.' Estimates of Swiss casualties are around 15,000 out of 35,000.^[505] At Ceresole in 1544 a contemporary observer noted that for a quarter league around the town ‘our horses were up to the knees in blood and couldn't walk for dead bodies'. Estimates of Imperial casualties were 12,000-15,000 ‘of all nations'.^[506]

Monluc recalled at the end of his life that he had been shot seven times while serving the king and that not one of his limbs was without a wound.^[507] Assaults during sieges were among the most deadly events, and surveys which started to be taken of wounded from the mid sixteenth century reveal that in such events most injuries were from arquebus shots but also from rocks thrown down on attackers. In hand-to-hand fighting the sword was the most likely source of wounds. It is usually thought that before the late seventeenth century there was little organised system for caring for battle wounded. This is not the case, though measures were rough and ready. Letters of the Regent Louise of Savoy offer vivid testimony to the ‘poor soldiers, horse and foot, who came from the camp nearly all in their shirt-sleeves' after Pavia.^[508] The issue was a crucial one, for it affected the morale of the troops. It seems that in this period the only possible course of action for the severely wounded was to place them in monasteries as lay brothers^[509] though La Noue later in the century thought the system ridiculous and very ineffective.^[510] There was an ambitious attempt by Marshal Charles de Cosse-Brissac (c. 1503-63) to deal with this in his 1551 ordinance by making a levy of 5 per cent on the pay at musters to be used to create military hospitals. Among the infantry companies at Casale in 1558 an average ofjust over 10 per cent of the men were sick. Among the legionaries at Calais at the same date, just over 11 per cent were out of action through illness or wounds.^[511]

Royal letters of 1537 observed that in the lansquenet regiments of Wilhelm von Fürstenberg (the main provider of German mercenaries for France in those years), there were a large number ‘sick, who for the extremity of their illness, cannot march with the colours'. The king had therefore, ‘to heal and restore them', and decided to move them ‘gently' to Auxerre. They were to be lodged in ‘some suitable place'.^[512] Some of the commanders of the Grisons troops who had been killed in the disastrous Parma campaign in 1554 were recommended for royal alms, as were captains who left children to be looked after, and a dozen common soldiers who returned minus limbs. Henri II sent a gold chain for a German page who had his leg blown off at the siege of Thionville in 1558. Monluc's infantry had large numbers of wounded after the capture of the town but they were taken to Metz ‘and I had hospital money distributed to them, that the Admiral [Coligny] had allocated, which was the reason for saving a whole world of wounded soldiers and prompt the men to risk themselves more boldly in battle'.^[513] Individuals who could obtain favours might be treated generously by the crown, as was Pierre de Rieux, a ‘poor gentleman' who had lost an arm by a cannon shot in Scotland and in 1549 was granted 300 ecus out of the sale of fallen trees in the royal forests, through the intervention of the Cardinal de Guise.²¹

The Habsburg-Valois wars gave rise to very significant developments in the treating of battle injuries and here the role of Ambroise Pare is pivotal. Born in Maine in c. 1510, he was apprenticed as a barber-surgeon to the count of Laval and worked in Paris at the Hotel-Dieu. But it was his attachment to the army of Montmorency on the Pas de Suse campaign of 1537 that initiated him into royal service in the armies. Describing a wound, he used the phrase ‘I treated him, God healed him.'^[514] Thereafter, he served as surgeon in nearly all the campaigns of the Habsburg-Valois wars and developed his famously pragmatic approach to the treating of wounds. Pare tells us that he had never dealt with firearms wounds before 1537 and had to learn as he went along to adapt the textbook remedies.^[515] In his publication of 1545 he recalls treating Marshal Brissac for gunshot wounds at the siege of Perpignan in 1542. It was then that he discovered that the traditional method of cauterising with boiling oil was only appropriate when there had been huge blood loss and that otherwise semi-warm poultices were the best way to heal wounds, while provoking suppuration was the best way to treat arrow wounds.^[516] Similarly, after the Battle of Saint-Quentin, he described using ‘Egyptiac' (possibly a honey-based ointment) dissolved in wine and eau de vie to combat the infection of wounds full of pus and maggots. Pare wrote his own account of his journeys and campaigns called his Apologie, one of the most vivid sources for the nature of wounds and the effects of weaponry, especially in the era of battlefield artillery. At Suse in 1537, he described the dead and dying and ‘hearing them cry under the feet of our horses, which made me feel great compassion in my heart'. In a stable, he found four dead soldiers and three wounded propped against a wall, their faces disfigured, hearing, seeing and saying nothing, their clothes still smoking from the cannon shot that had burned them. An old soldier came and asked if there was any hope for them. Pare said no, so he quickly cut their throats ‘gently and without anger'. When Pare reproached him, he said he hoped that in a similar case he would find someone to do the same for him.²⁵ In 1545, he recalled service against the English at Boulogne, where a cannon shot (which killed four men) passed so near a French soldier's breast-plate skirt that the skin of his thigh was painfully scorched. Pare treated the livid skin, while being mocked by the old soldiers for ducking when the cannon shot passed.²⁶ Pare recounts all the normal events of war: execution of a defeated garrison if they did not surrender in time or, as in the case of the Hesdin campaign (1552), of all

Spanish soldiers captured after they had set fire to their powder magazines. Also at Hesdin in 1553, he observed the psychological effect of constant artillery bombardment on seriously injured soldiers. He reported the emper­or's siege army at Metz, devastated by famine and hunger during the winter of 1552-3: ‘each soldier had his camp bed and a coverlet of shining and brilliant stars clearer than fine gold; each day they had fine white sheets and lodged at the sign of the moon, making good cheer when they had the means and paying their host so well that they went off scot free'. Most were shoeless and most were soon dead.^[517]

Of course, war wrought much wider devastation on civilians and here many of the conventions and modes of conduct were inherited from the past. Noblemen who wrote about war tended to treat the resistance of peasants to being pillaged with contempt. Rabutin, who was not totally unsympathetic to suffering, observed that the peasants were unwilling to help their own soldiers and were more intent on pillaging the dead than helping them. The regular soldiers during the Metz campaign, as soon as they left their camps in small numbers, had their throats cut by the ‘villainous peasants'.^[518] When villagers fought back, they could do so effectively. In September 1523, a band of 100 adventurers (foot soldiers) came to a village in the Oise and proceeded to ransack it, arguing that letters of safeguard were of no account. The peasants were driven into the cemetery, but then, finding they were greater in number, fought back and drove the soldiers off. The captain then threa­tened to return and punish them.^[519] All this was largely the result of two causes: first, it is not clear that peasants made any great distinction between ‘friendly' and ‘enemy' soldiers; second, the very rudimentary supply systems of armies almost demanded pillage by royal soldiers in order to stay alive, this despite quite rigorous military discipline systems that were being put in place. The disciplining of these bodies of horsemen became a notorious problem. Philippe de Commynes, the Burgundian counsellor who was won over to his side by Louis XI, commented that they were:

constantly quartered throughout the country, without paying for anything, and doing other evils and excesses which everyone of us knows about: for they are not content with their rations, and so they beat and abuse the poor people and force them to go and find bread, wine and other food for them; and if the goodman has a wife or daughter who is beautiful, he would be wise to keep her out of sight.^[520]

In Lombardy in 1500, Marshal Trivulzio reported that Cardinal d'Amboise was ‘tremendously angry about the pillage by the men-at-arms this side of the Ticino and the ransoms we hear they have extorted'. Scarcely a town or village had escaped ransom and the captains were to be ordered to account for their men.^[521] Vile behaviour was double-edged, of course. In Puglia in 1502 we hear of a ‘lackey', a ‘murderer and mauvais garfon', who, due to be hanged, redeemed himself by slaughtering twenty Spaniards.^[522]

It is now being realised that the violent response of village communities to military rampage was more than just a reaction of revenge or even of social conflict. In a sense, though this was a period in which intensively trained professionals dominated the battlefield, the traditional dichotomy between ‘soldier' and ‘civilian' is illusory; arms were universal. Village communes had well-established structures of organising military responses to outsiders, either over taxes or over military occupation. This was why the French crown could hope to employ the age-old resources of the francs-archers (peasants who were released from taxes in order to be available for military service) or their successors, the legionnaires. The notion that the French state was reluctant to employ French peasantry as infantry because the nobles feared the arming of the peasants is largely a myth. In addition the great cities were used to organising their own militias. The state was keen for such formations to train with both the bow and the arquebus in the sixteenth century, though careful about the effects on the spread of crime and routine violence as a result (with ordinances in 1546, 1548 and 1558).

It is the case that gross disorder was never far away from military opera­tions. The early 1520s was the era of the mauvais garfons, largely out-of­control soldiery par excellence, and stories involving them were common. Francis I in September 1523 denounced:

Some adventurers, vagabond men, idle, lost, wicked, criminal, abandoned to all vices, thieves, murderers, ravishers, violators of women and girls, blas­phemers and deniers of God, cruel, inhuman, unmerciful, who make a virtue of vice and have cast themselves into the pit of all evils, ravishing wolves made to destroy everyone and who will and can do no good service; whose custom is to devour the people.³³

Fifteen hundred mauvais garfons roamed through Poitou and were only put down with great losses by a commune force led by the local nobility.^[523] Eventually there were 6,000-7,000, who began their devastation in Berry and then moved on to Poitou. ‘They were men abandoned to all vice and wickedness and attacked, among others, priests and judges and all the gallows they found along their way they cast down.'^[524] In 1543, Francis I wrote to the captain-general of the Norman legion that ‘this canaille’ of the legion, when its pay had not arrived, ‘had cried: money, money!’ and had deserted their colours. He therefore issued orders for them to be ‘cut to pieces’ and a goodly number of them hanged ‘to inspire horror and fear’ in the rest.^[525]

The campaigns between France and the rulers of the Low Countries between the mid fifteenth and mid sixteenth centuries generated what we may call a crisis of ‘habitability’ which afflicted the region intermittently over that century, generated very largely by the inability until 1559 of the French and Habsburg rulers to agree on the frontier between them. As it happens, the sources for this region are particularly rich over a century and illustrate the recurrence and accumulation of traditional patterns of military violence. The abbe of Saint-Riquier relates much about the destructive nature of Charles the Bold’s campaigns in Picardy in 1472.^[526] At Nesle, he stormed the town and ‘all within were killed except certain churchmen, women and children. The town was also totally burned and destroyed.’ Later in the campaign the duke came before Poix, ‘where he burned town and castle. From there, he came to Oisemont, which he also burned with several villages.’ After the Burgundian army took and burned Gamaches, they marched across Vimeu, ‘which was totally pillaged and looted’. As a result of these ruthless actions, the castles of Rambures and Eu were surrendered, even though they could have been defended. In August, the French king’s troops came back and tried to take Auxy, which had a stout castle. The town and lower court were overrun but fighting developed on the drawbridge and the French were repulsed by the Burgundian garrison, losing only one soldier ‘killed by a culverin on the galleries of the castle’. However, while the fighting was going on, ‘the French lords lodged in the good mansions and others pillaged and looted everything they could find'. The town, which had been burned a few years before, was torched along with the mills along the river and the countryside around scoured for prisoners. Late in August, the French attacked Hesdin, destroying the suburbs and then most of the villages above the town along the River Canche. In the aftermath of the campaign, famine and plague spread and ‘the sick were brought back in carts to Abbeville and Hesdin and elsewhere, some dying on the way, others on arrival. On this campaign the duke burned more than 300 villages in the country of Caux, a great pity and loss for the poor people.' Plague broke out among the soldiers garrisoned in the abbey of Saint-Riquier, while some of the garrison went out into the fields to remove the stacks of grain and beat the peasants who tried to resist them. The towns of Ribemont and Chauny were burned in October by the duke after they surrendered. One incident which concerned the abbot of Saint-Riquier provides a telling illustration. With his abbey full of soldiers, the abbe decided to seek refuge elsewhere and had himself taken in a spring carriage through the forest of Crecy: when he came to Domvast, he found villagers fleeing in panic and crying: ‘To the woods! To the woods!' So he had his men set him on a mule and fled. The renewal of war in 1475 brought the destruction of the abbey of Saint-Riquier and much other pillage.

The bad times returned, this time with little respite, with the beginning of the Habsburg-Valois wars in 1521. The impact of fighting on France itself became much more immediate and was symbolised by the march of Nassau along the frontier from Mezieres to Guise. Du Bellay memorably summed up this campaign and its effects: ‘After sacking the little town of Aubenton, they put everyone to the sword, without distinction, of all sexes and ages, with a remarkable cruelty; from that stemmed the terrible cruelties of the wars for thirty years after.'^[527] War began again in 1536, with sieges ofPeronne, Saint-Pol and Montreuil. A statistical measure for the impact of war between 1537 and 1545 is available from the enquiries made about war losses for the villages belonging to Emperor Charles V in Artois during these campaigns. There is much detail available from these on the strategies used by peasants to avoid plunder - fleeing to the forests, holding out in quarries or church towers - and also on the gross cruelties of occupying soldiers, but we can also use the source to measure the losses involved. For instance, for a sample of forty villages surveyed, 86 per cent of livestock was lost between 1536 and 1538. In the same period, the grain harvest was reduced to 18.64 per cent of what it had been before the fighting. Again, in 1542-5, 374 villages were surveyed for war losses with similar effects, though there is less precision over the proportion of losses. Some villages claimed to have been burned several times, including newly harvested grain. Those enclaved in enemy territory were treated worst, especially around Bapaume. Typically, in 1542 when crops were destroyed, the men left for refuge in Arras, leaving just a few women behind; occasionally it was possible to hold out in a church tower, though these were only of use against casual marauders.^[528]

The very same regions were to be fought over again in the 1550s, their travails this time documented by Jean Thieulaine, lawyer and bourgeois of Arras.^[529] War began again in 1551 with manoeuvres on both sides, but serious operations really started in October 1552 when the Habsburg armies under the comte du Rreulx burned towns all along the frontier and took the town and castle of Hesdin. The French re-occupied it in December. Early in the next year, the French pillaged the town and castle of Saint-Pol, as they had in 1536, ‘killing the people and burning the castle and other buildings as well as demolishing the gates and part of the walls'. Thieulaine was writing from the point of view of a subject of Emperor Charles V, who had been unable to pay his troops and noted that ‘the good towns and the countryside suffered greatly, especially the people of Cambrai, where the Spaniards in garrison made themselves masters of the town, forcing the people to feed and give them money, breaking into private houses and publicly forcing the granaries'. German troops in the garrisons of the region operated a racket by forcing the locals to ‘lend' them their money.

Operations became much more devastating from 1553. The city of Therouanne with its cathedral was completely erased from the map when the emperor's troops took it. August saw a soaring price of grain and the outbreak of dysentery in the region. Spanish soldiers in the emperor's service were no great boon to their master's subjects:

The Spaniards, instead of helping us, pillaged... carrying off animals and people, both men and girls and women, some of whom were raped at the camp, though this was concealed to save their honour, and as for the men, many were ill-treated and ransomed. After that, the Spaniards forced the cutting of the grain and took it off to their camp.

Pillaging continued on both sides with ‘great damage, both to the stock-piles and to the newly gathered and stored harvest, which was all lost without any chance for the poor people to save anything for their support or for future sowing'. Raiding on the borders of Picardy and Artois drove peasants to desperation, forcing them into the town of Arras, sleeping in the streets and on the verge of starvation. French soldiers descended on the same area in October, ‘burning and committing such execrable deeds as killing old women, raping girls and nuns, killing or carrying off children'. The chronicler Louis Bresin described the revenge raids of the emperor's troops in December as ‘similar cruelties and burnings in the King's lands... sacking the town of Ancre and burning it'.^[530] What strikes forcefully about the narrative of these events is that warfare, normally much quieter during the winter months, seems to have continued unabated in the winter of 1553-4.

Endemic war in a region also engendered endemic low-level violence. In 1523 and 1524, out of 185 pardons for homicide issued by the French crown in Picardy, thrity-three were for soldiers (17.8 per cent) and, of these, ten were archers of the gendarmerie, the rest defined as ‘hommes/compagnons de guerre' or ‘aventuriers' in the infantry.^[531] In the period from 1490 to 1560, an average of roughly 13 per cent of pardons were issued for military men, with the years of greatest numbers corresponding rather closely with those in which active campaigning required the presence of infantry formations as well as the permanent gendarmerie. These figures do not include the many other cases in which soldiers played some active or passive role in the causes of a murder.

During periods in which there was a large garrison in the province, the early 1520s, late 1530s and mid 1540s, the frequency of such events would increase. In the first half of 1544, we find a murder at Origny on the Hainaut border resulting from a quarrel over who had the best fighters in neighbour­ing village forts; a murder in a tavern at Boulogne by a gentleman of the gendarmerie over dinner with a man who tipped beer over his fish; a murder by a piper in Villequin's company of 500 foot at Saint-Quentin; another by a 23-year-old infantryman at Vervins; by a member of the Picard legion in the hostelry at Grandvilliers; retrospectively for an archer ofJametz's company for a murder in 1538 over a quarrel in an inn at Dammartin over filles dejoie. The majority of cases in which the soldiers were petitioners involved vio­lence between soldiers and indicates the fairly obvious point that the military lived in their own world and were most likely to quarrel among themselves.

This is not to minimise the obvious problems of insecurity caused more generally by war and the presence of armies. One accused murderer claimed that even in September 1529, after the Peace of Cambrai, he and his friends had carried staves ‘because the country is full of soldiers who daily pillage those they meet on the roads'. Petitioners who lived in the Thierache region and Ardennes customarily appealed to the fact that their territory was border country and therefore in danger of enemy raiding, presumably to explain their armed reactions, while the presence of uncontrolled soldiers was always given as a reason for possession of weapons. The inhabitants of Montcornet, during 1536, justified violent actions by the fact that they were ‘routinely told to have weapons of war ready for defence'. This was the case all over the border country from Calais to the Ardennes. In the home, there were threats from random and quasi-military violence, especially in that area subjected to much raiding by both sides, as for instance in 1543-4.^[532] In March 1544, in Ponthieu, a farm was invaded by two ‘vagabond adventurers', one of whom had killed a man three weeks before. The two were notorious murderers and thieves, probably out to ‘ransom' the farmers, as was often the custom during border warfare. They laid hands on the 56-year-old servant, threatened to rape the farmer's wife, and attacked a priest. The wife screamed and her husband came with a pitchfork he had to hand and the result was a scuffle in which the farmer and his uncle managed to fight off one of the soldiers and in the course of which the ruffian was stabbed. During the Anglo-French war in 1545, two ‘English savages' had raided a village near Montreuil even after the peace; these two Englishmen ‘took to lurking in the woods and fields' to waylay the villagers. Again, the result was a fight and the killing of the intruders.

These examples, taken from one well-documented region, simply illus­trate the endemic nature of violence which accompanied any war. The features specific to this period combine a more intensive kind of violence brought about by changes in military technology and the scale of war with a broadly dysfunctional control system. This meant that the larger armies and more destructive campaign had an impact of casualties and losses among the soldiery as well as a chaotic impact on the ‘civilian' population, though the patterns of ‘collateral' violence remained much the same as they had been for centuries.